


I Fell Down The F*cking Cliff

by NoTimeTeen



Category: Original Work
Genre: Essay, Freestyle, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 20:05:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12306744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoTimeTeen/pseuds/NoTimeTeen
Summary: Quick essay I wrote in my profile at FF dot net, and of which I felt particularly proud."I think what made me feel like writing just ten minutes ago was that this sentence occurred to me: I fell down the f*cking cliff. Just walked right past the motherf*cking catcher, trampled right over the rye, and fell down the f*cking cliff. (The censored profanities are for dramatic purposes only.)"





	I Fell Down The F*cking Cliff

10-07-2017 - It's pretty late where I'm at, and for some reason I felt like writing a bit.

It's been a long time since I last felt like embarking into an earnest writing project. Still, somehow I wouldn't define my last few months as fruitless, since I've been taking pretty seriously my dream of becoming a writer and improving my technique and so on (to the point that I've been rethinking some of my academic choices) . . . not to mention the fact that I've been revisiting a lot of the old books that helped me become what I am (namely, the Harry Potter series, the Rick Riordan world(s)) in order to make a deeper analysis of what I used to read. Just gonna say about that last part that going back to what first inspired me to write has been amazingly insightful.

I'm just babbling . . . sort of . . . I think. I think what made me feel like writing just ten minutes ago was that this sentence occurred to me: I fell down the f*cking cliff. Just walked right past the motherf*cking catcher, trampled right over the rye, and fell down the f*cking cliff. (The censored profanities are for dramatic purposes only.)

I was laying here, peacefully listening to León Larregui's latest album, while giving a quick analytic reread to one of my old stories, when suddenly the album was done. I went to the music app and hit play on Green Day's latest album (and the best one they've released since American Idiot, if you ask me), and for some reason realized how little I listen to them as of late.

Went back to the FF app, finished chapter VIII of some story, and aimlessly read the summaries for all the stories I've got posted. All while indulging in a fairly self-aware mood. Thought how I've neglected listening to Green Day, which I used to like so much, the Arctic Monkeys, the Strokes, Zoé themselves, to mention a few examples. . . .

And I'm like, not like I don't like what I used to like anymore or anything. I mean, I could be reading half the unread books that stack my bookshelf instead of wasting my time in the hundredth read of the Order of the Phoenix. If I don't listen to all that anymore it's because I filled my phone with 'different' music, just for the sake of expanding my horizons, not because I stopped liking them (even though most of Zoé's and the Strokes's songs have aged rather badly in my opinion).

I start feeling okay with it . . . for like a second. Then I come across the bunch of Victorious stories that I haven't made myself delete from this profile, think back on the characters of the show, and figure, I f*cking fell off the cliff; if not with all, at least I have with that one topic.

If you'd tell me years, months, maybe weeks ago that when I made myself think of Victorious tonight I would feel annoyed, I would've questioned it, probably even debated it. Now, though, it annoys me just thinking I ever wrote fanfictions about it. I've come to a point in which even Jade West, of whom I've always had a fairly positive opinion, feels like an underdeveloped character, part of a rather crappy show that most likely won't trascend its own generation, product of the creative (?) mind of one of the most formulaic producers I could identify by name though not by face.

I fell down that f*cking cliff.

But then again, who doesn't, right? Many of us probably still listen to the music we used to listen to ten, twenty years ago, still loving it as if we were back to just discovering the wonders of the artistic varieties and of our own personal tastes. But it is inevitable, I think, that at least a few of the things we used to like when we were young, stop being to our liking when we grow up.

The fact that we all fall down cliffs, however, can't really soften the impact of such a discovery. If I was in one of my cynical moods I probably would've thought, that's just what growning up is all about; but strangely enough, I'm not feeling very cynical right now. Not more than as I usually feel anyway. And yet, the explanation I would give to this continuing cliff-falling that is the process of what some could probably call 'the coming-of-age', is that it actually _is_ a part of our coming-of-age.

What I would say to continue with such an idea, is that growing up is exploring and filtering. That it is knowing, learning, processing, and discriminating.

When I first started watching The Walking Dead it was because people all around kept saying it was pretty good, and I became interested in _knowing_ it. I've always thought the first episode was crap, though (along with the rest of the first season). I still sort of forced myself to keep watching it. I'd just finished watching Breaking Bad, and the first few episodes had also been rather slow (though I will never, I think, consider them bad), so I imagined maybe the good parts everybody talked about would come eventually. And they sort of did, didn't they? All those plots with the Governor and Shane and sh*t are, I think, what keep the show alive even today.

So, after knowing it, and _learning_ that it, indeed, was kind of good, I guess you could say I allowed myself to _process_ what the whole show was about: a bunch of survivors that would have a much easier time if they just decided to kill themselves in order to stop living aimlessly, but that still decided to keep living in a world that, though filled with flesh-eating monsters, still had as its biggest enemy the human being. . . . (After getting past that ellipsis I can't make myself analyse further into the aim of the show.)

Suffice it to say that, after processing what I thought it was about, I wasn't really impressed by it. I made a fleeting attempt at reading the comic books, but liked them even less. Then came the point where I decided, it's not for me, I don't like it. It's not that it isn't good, it's just not my thing. I differentiated it from what I do like. I _discriminated_ it.

So you see, growing up is knowing, learning, processing, and discriminating. At least in my opinion.

The same happened to me with Victorious. I grew up liking the characters because of the actresses, the characterizations, and the nature (and potential nature) of their relationship, but eventually realized that the show hardly ever risked anything at all. (All of these are just my opinions.)

For example, in my mind it became kind of obvious that in a show where there's two characters so apparently contradictory such as Jade and Tori, the obvious evolution that the audience would expect (and that the writers would devise), was that in which said two characters would grow steadily closer and change in a way that the innocent and naive one would become more mature and careful, and the cold and intolerant one would open up to others and become more accepting.

So, after processing these thoughts (in a manner that I'm pretty sure was unconscious), I eventually came to terms with the fact that, at least in my opinion, Victorious was a safe-bet, crappy show, and that it didn't deserve the attention that it has gotten (because, I think, mediocre shows should be ignored so that the writers and producers become bolder in order to attract more public, thus respecting the writing profession and helping it evolve).

The point returns still, right? I fell down the f*cking cliff. But then again, who doesn't? Francis Scott Fitzgerald criticized Ernest Hemingway because he was, I imagine, sort of mainstream; and yet, Fitzgerald spent several of his last years trying to become a movie screenwriter. What's more mainstream that cinema, I wonder. . . .

Who knows? Maybe Holden Caulfield, the kid who dreamed of becoming the catcher in the rye to prevent kids from falling down the cliff of contradiction, at the end of the field of rye that represented the place in which their innocence remained intact, one day woke up to find that Phoebe, his sister, had already fallen off the cliff while he was sleeping.

What's more - maybe one day he found himself at the bottom of the cliff along with all of us, and discovered that, while falling off the cliff _did_ help you lose your innocence, and probably contradict your tastes, hobbies, habits, and opinions, it didn't necessarily change your nature.

Maybe when he found himself down here, at the bottom of the cliff, he realized that maybe, just maybe, falling off the cliff was kind of a necessary step, because once you learn to change from who you used to be when you were a kid, you also learn that changing is a natural part of life, and that, the more you change, either for better or for worse, you could say, the easier it becomes to change always aiming for the better, until one day, with much luck and much changing, you become something you're happy with and that is also functional within your world.

But anyway. My whole point being that I realized just now how much I f*cking hate Victorious after years of being inspired by it, how I don't regret my sudden harsh feelings at all, and how much I consider my sudden hate a positive change for my personality . . . or whatever.

I wasn't very sleepy when I started writing, but I quite am right now. If anyone at all read this far, I wish you good night.

Con mis mejores deseos,

NTT.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanna believe it was clear. If not: the reference of the cliff is from J. D. Salinger's magnificent The Catcher in the Rye.
> 
> If anyone reads this and feels like commenting anything at all, please do (though I really doubt I'll even read comments).


End file.
